Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

coondoggie writes to tell us that with the "new and improved" NASA budget on the way it looks like many of the cool projects NASA has in the works will never see the light of day, let alone space. The biggest cut looks to be the Ares heavy lift rocket but other cuts include a new composite spacecraft, deep space network, inflatable lunar habitat, and an electric moon-buggie.

It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again. We are draining Earth resources and should try to expand to space. If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth. This way we never get intergalactic flights nor can live on other planets.

Maybe NASA could sell or license some of this "cool tech" to private industry. The private sector would have more to work with and the space agency would get more money for the projects they are left to focus on. And maybe some of the specialists at NASA could fork their own companies with the technology, keeping more people employed.

Maybe they already do this. But the tone of the post makes it sound like they don't.

Maybe NASA could sell or license some of this "cool tech" to private industry. The private sector would have more to work with and the space agency would get more money for the projects they are left to focus on. And maybe some of the specialists at NASA could fork their own companies with the technology, keeping more people employed.

Maybe they already do this. But the tone of the post makes it sound like they don't.

The problem is that there's little immediate return on investment.

Sure, give it a few years and we get nifty things like GPS and freeze-dried ice cream... But in the short term it's just pure science. And nobody likes pure science anymore.

nice business model:
1) Get handed billions of dollars in taxpayer money
2) Use that money to develop expensive technology
3) License that technology to the same taxpayers for yet more money, claiming it as a measure to save taxpayer money
4) Profit

Like, I've pretty much had it up to here with this myth of "private industry" as the salvation of everything. Banks were private industry, and they screwed the pooch not once, but three times in the last 30 years, to the tune of multiple national, no, worldwide economic meltdowns, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and for what? So we can have the pleasure of driving ourselves into the ground with more debt?

The irony too, is that, I'm a right wing Republican that got modded down on a generally liberal board for defending a government program against privatization. I'm still scratching my head on that one!

At the risk of stating the obvious: Maybe private industry will build buggies that can drive on the moon, and infalatable places for people to stay on the moon? Just because public sector is grounded (Earthed?) for now doesn't mean private companies are.

Sure, maybe they can charter voyages to Alpha Centauri while they're at it.

Honestly, what is private industry going to do with these things on the moon? You have to send people there somehow, and 1) no private company has anything near the capability of sen

...If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth....

Hmmm...1st object in space - Germany1st Earth satellite - Soviet Union1st human in orbit - Soviet Union1st photograph of far side of the Moon - Soviet Union1st landing on the Moon - Soviet Union1st rover on another body - Soviet Union1st large biological specimens outside LEO (around the Moon, in a Zond version of Soyuz...turtles;p ) and brought back safely - Soviet Union1st landing on Venus - Soviet Union1st landing on Mars - Soviet Union1st space station - Soviet Union (BTW, the Russian part of ISS was supposed to be called "Mir 2")

And so on. In the meantime Europe could afford to play the game and they ended up being the biggest, I think, commercial launch operator(?). Or of the biggest anyway. With their ATV they are a small step from having manned spaceflight capability. China has one already, India is working on it, Japan has some plans too, and all are quite active in Solar System exploration. Plus you have private companies.

"Space race" undoubtedly played a large part, but it doesn't lessen the point that not only NASA was responsible for major progress. Besides, I like to think it wasn't merely about state level competition - after all there was valuable science being made on both sides, and the first breakthroughs relied on many years of progress being made before the race proper. With later ones also building on that early progress obviously.

Plus...who knows, we might see another race at some point. China gears up, Russia i

Sorry, Mr Checkov, you are mistaken. The Soviets neither landed on nor put a rover on the moon before the US (we landed manned moon buggies), and the Germans weren't the first to put an object in space, that was in fact the Soviets. The US went to the edge of space with the X-15 plane, but the Soviets beat us (and the Germans) to space proper.

The Soviets also put the first satellite in space.

"Interesting" would have been an accurate mod, but informative it was not. More like misinformative.

The German V-2 was capable of reaching space in a vertical launch with a light payload. Whether any ever did or not is not clear. The many thousands that were launched were generally not vertically launched.

I can't see the youtube... But basically, you've got it backwards. Ballistic trajectories for long range are fired non-vertical. Vertical launch is for close range. Longest range is around 35-38 degrees from vertical (accounting for air resistance).

In vertical flight all the way up they were capable of aroound 200 km. While it is indeed not clear if any were launched that way, in operational flights they attained 90-110 km. Lower number satisfies US definition of "space", which is enough in this case, I gues;p. Higher one fulfills also international definition.

True, but highly misleading. You're comparing a high speed impact of an unmanned object (Luna 2), with a soft landing of a manned ship that later took off and returned to Earth (Apollo 11).

That the Russians were ahead of the USA in space exploration in the late 50's and early 60's is a matter of historical record. Luna 2 predated the USA's Ranger 4 impact by ~3 years. The USA made great strides to catch up and both countries first soft-landed a ship in 1966, (Luna 13 / Surveyor 1).

In the history of the world, only 12 humans have ever walked on the moon and all were Americans.

You are wrong, Sir.
German A-4 rockets, better known as v-2, reached outer space as early as the forties, making them first man made objects in space. The Soviet Lunokhod 1 landed on the moon in november 1970, the first use of a lunar rover. Apollo 15 was the first American use of a rover on the moon, nine months later. In fact, the soviet space program landed a probe on the moon in 1959, the Luna 2.

is that the list of 'Soviet firsts' should really be 'captured German engineers working for the Soviets firsts'.

And the later 'American firsts' ought to be 'captured German engineers working for the Americans firsts'.

I can't think of any early space-flight that did not depend on lots of German know-how and support. Perhaps the British 'Black Knight' and 'Blue Streak' programs, which were pretty well entirely home-grown. But even they only did this because the Germans had shown that it could be done first....

So? You still can't argue that NASA is not an enormous contributor to planetary science and remote sensing.

Consider the Soviet Mars program. They sent three landers there over three years, and Russia is just getting around to following up on those. NASA has sent seven missions there over thirty years, very elaborate and sophisticated ones. The Viking lander was a scientific tour de force, and the US Mars Rover mission alone is a record breaker for sheer number of days in operation.

On the other hand, the Soviet space program practically owned Venus, spent decades in a serious, extended effort to gather data there. That's a huge contribution to science, because Venus is hard, but very, very interesting due to its similarities and differences with/to Earth.

As far as the Earth is concerned, I don't think there is any contest, science-wise. Not to denigrate Soviet contributions in engineering, but I don't think we can even begin to calculate the value of something like Landsat, or the other Earth Science oriented missions undertaken by NASA or with NASA playing a key part.

A "punch list of firsts" approach is not a very good way to gauge the importance of a nation's space exploration program.

It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again. We are draining Earth resources and should try to expand to space. If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth. This way we never get intergalactic flights nor can live on other planets.

The basis for a good space programme with adequate long term funding is a good economy. The US have been borrowing like there is no tomorrow and is heading

I follow your logic that a good economy makes a good budget however I don't agree that this means NASA's budget now relates to it's future budget in that way. NASA's budget is too small of a percentage of government spending to have that kind of effect on the future economy. It could be raised quite a bit and this would still be true.

Are you implying that the republicans are better than the democrats at balancing the national budget? Because to my knowledge the last time the national budget was balanced was under the Democrats, and the republicans under Bush and co. just added more and more to the national debt with their expensive and never ending wars in the middle east.

We're going to be at 100% Debt to GDP by the end of this fiscal year most likely. And that's a GOOD thing, because it was the only way to halt the slide into depression that was already in motion when the Dem's came to power, thanks largely to the laissez faire regulation policy of the Replublicans. Putting people who believe that the government is incapable of helping in power just allows them to prove their own hypothesis by doing everything they can to make sure that it doesn't function. If they actually

>It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again.

How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?

Because the original Exploration plan *did* close within the current budget. Cost growth and schedule delays made it grow beyond the budget. Also, Obama isn't cancelling the program to save money... he is cancelling the program so that those funds can be used for *other* things closer to his core agenda (namely earth observation and climate science missions).

>Because the original Exploration plan *did* close within the current budget. Cost growth and schedule delays made it grow beyond the budget.

Those two statements contradict each other. NASA cant deliver this thing without an extra 3 billion a year for the next 8 or 9 years. The path to the moon is not sustainable and would only relive 1950s era achievements. Better off with robotics and earth science and building a role for private enterprise.

The political consequences of cutting NASA are trivial compared to cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicate or defense. In fairly short order every discretionary program is going to be cut to the bone in order to put off the day when the big entitlement programs have to be dealt with.

NASA's getting more of a budget ($6 billion over 5 years). Also, NASA will be reviving its R&D efforts, which were mostly ended to fund Ares/Constellation when it started going overbudget. Here's my recent slashdot submission below... please up-mod it if you think it's worthwhile!

"The White House and NASA have revealed in this year's budget proposal their new plans for the agency. The big news is that NASA's budget-consuming Constellation program has been cancelled, as the project was 'over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies,' and would mostly be a repetition of Apollo-era achievements with a handful of astronauts. NASA will also be getting a budget boost of $6 billion over 5 years. Technological development and testing programs will be revived and expanded, in order to develop new capabilities and make exploration activities more cost-effective with key technologies like in-orbit propellant transfer and advanced in-space propulsion. There will be a steady stream of robotic missions to perform science, scout locations, and demonstrate tech needed for future human missions. Research and development will also be done to support future heavy-lift rockets with more capacity and lower operation costs. NASA will be maximizing the return on its investment in the ISS, extending it past 2016 and deploying new reseach facilities (potentially including a long-desired centrifuge to study human physiology in space). NASA will also use commercial contracts for routine human and cargo transportation to the space station, as it already does for most unmanned missions, which will 'help create thousands of new jobs and help reduce the cost of human access to space.' More details will be provided by NASA Administrator (and former astronaut) Charles Bolden over the coming week, and then NASA has to get its plans through a potentially-hostile Congress."

NASA's budget is being increased by 6 billion dollars. They're canceling the Constellation program because it wasn't originally funded enough to ever work. The schedule has slipped so much there wasn't going to be a replacement for the Space Shuttle until 2038 or beyond. The director's statement is here: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420994main_2011_Budget_Administrator_Remarks.pdf [nasa.gov]

To be clear, NASA *is* getting more budget in the proposed plan. It's a matter of what the money will be spent on. This latest move is consistent with the findings of the Augustine commission last fall, which was that the program of returning to the moon had little chance of success by 2020 at current funding levels. If you accept that judgment and are actually looking for forward progress, then either you (a) increase the budget for manned spaceflight, or (b) change your goals. Political forces and the current economy make (a) impossible, so they're going with (b).

A problem with NASA's manned spaceflight program is that the footprint is spread across some very influential states (e.g., TX and FL) and companies (Boeing etc.). All of the complaining in Congress about this proposal is simply about saving jobs and govt subsidy of their local economies. Truthfully a big part of why the Shuttle is such an expensive way to get stuff into orbit is the thousands of ground support personnel needed. The Congressional representatives from these states love expensive spaceflight, and will do what they can to protect it.

reflecting on how this kind of tragedy can happen, and how it relates to our very rational, ends-oriented world, should read Horkheimer and Adorno's (in)famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and its much heralded account of how the very nature of rational Enlightenment thinking carries the danger that we'll fail to enter into "a truly human state" as a world, instead descending into "a new age of barbarism" marked by things like anti-intellectual mass culture, multiplying high-tech wars, short-sighted exploitation, and other modern ills that appear to destroy society and the planet.

It was written back during the Nazi+Emerging Cold War era, but it remains as relevant a warning today as ever.

I have only one point to take issue with your response: "[...] aging systems and cost runaways like Constellation."

Cutting edge in military and space applications never means bleeding edge. People would *die* . You can't afford to trade stability for fanciness when you have the possibility of hitting re-entry too steep and everybody burns to a cinder. The core operational technology of any manned vehicle must be old enough to have been thoroughly tested and already field-proven in some capacity.

That is not the organizations mission statement. You can make up crowd pleasing shit all your want, but that doesnt make it true. Here's the real mission statement, please note these are all doable without shoving meatbags on top of a rocket and having them play golf on the moon:

" To improve life here, To extend life to there, To find life beyond.[10] "

--NASA Mission" To understand and protect our home planet, To explore the Universe and search for life, and To inspire the next generation of explorers... as only NASA can.[10] "

--NASA Vision

In fact, I would argue that finding life beyond the solar system can only be done with robotics. Your meatbag body isnt going to handle a 100 year journey too well and even if it was possible it wouldnt be worth the cost.

I've never fully understood this point-of-view. I am a capitalist and generally a moderate with regard to politics, so I don't stand on the platform of one or the other established parties. That said, both sides seem to be "anti-intellectual" in their policy making. They directly remove educational/research funding in order to inflate the pork budgets of projects in their region. That's a problem of serious proportions. How do you justify ANYTHING within this POV that leads to equal gain for all parties on

Not quite. NASA's getting more money, not less. But they're not going to be spending it on things that will be served by free market resources in the near future. Thus, they will have more money for other projects, particularly actual research. Rather than building another 1960's style heavy lift rocket.

Have you read the budget documents? They don't say that at all. Privatization only applies to LEO transport -- a well-known, well-defined task with clear profit potential and well-understood risks.

The budget specifically states that its renewing a focus on developing fundamental technologies, something that was lacking in the past decades and the main reason Constellation was a dinosaur. The budget specifically lists some things like enabling technologies for heavy lift vehicles, improving RTGs for planetary exploration (we're about to run out of P238), in-situ resource utilization, lunar regolith factories, and in-space propulsion. There are increased budgets for planetary and earth science.

This is NASA concentrating on its roots. NASA was in charge of getting people to LEO when that was new and challenging and unknown. NASA roots are doing the new hard things, with a focus on exploration.

An overview "Fact Sheet" on the proposed FY2011 budget for NASA has been published by the OMB at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/ [whitehouse.gov] The Constellation program is cancelled, and this could mean thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and Texas at the major human space flight centers. The savings from the cuts will be reinvested in new R&D for future exploration.

That is one thing they don't seem to look at when looking at how much something in the space program costs.Almost everything built is built in the US by US workers. Thousands of good paying "MANUFACTURING" jobs will be lost.It will also hit Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as Florida, Texas, Alabama, and yes California.Hey Obama kept his campaign promise as was posted in Slashdot.

I'm one of the most passionate people you'll find about space exploration but I'm glad constellation has been cancelled - it's about time.Why? It wasn't about building a Big Dumb Booster which is blatantly what is needed, but about a jobs program. If you really want a program to create jobs regardless of if they are useful jobs then employ people to go around breaking windows - lots of skilled jobs in the window fitting and glazing industry created there for minimal government spending. The government creat

That reads proposed budget. Doesn't mean it's the actual budget, it's just what the current monkey in the whitehouse wants. It's congress, a bunch of monkeys, that write the checks. The congress critter in the states that will be affected carry a lot of weight on if the NASA budget will be cut. Yeah, they are idiots too, but they are our idiots.

So I wouldn't say the fat lady has sung on any of these projects yet. She maybe warming up in the bullpit but by god she hasn't sung yet.

Unfortunately it is the whole country that loses in this case. I can remember well the day that Al Gore announced the shuttle replacement. The two finalists were a craft that had already been built and flight tested and another that existed as a powerpoint presentation that relied on technology that is still not feasible. The finalists that actually had built and tested their craft were passed over so that Bill and Al could provide a big fat payday to their wing nut allies in California.

This from the party that always cries about Republicans some how manipulating science for their own nefarious purposes.

The history of the effort to develop a successor to the Shuttle is littered with cancelled projects, and test programs that were never part of a coherent technology development program. You appear to be referring to the DC-X [wikipedia.org], but in fact, the other finalist candidate for the X-33 [wikipedia.org] test demonstrator program was not the DC-X, it was a winged-flyback rocket design from Rockwell [nasa.gov], which hadn't been flown, either.

It looks to me like the biggest, underlying source of mess is that NASA is financed from federal budget, but with funding of particular projects bringing great benefits to specific areas / contractors. So of course their representatives will fight for what's good primarily to them, not to space programme as a whole...

ESA seems to be set up more sensibly in this regard. Each memberstate decides how much it wants to pay, so that is the way in which they can have a say when it comes to assigning projects.

The shuttle is retiring. There's no stopping that. No more external fuel tanks are being manufactured, the rest of the parts chain is shutting down. When the shuttle is gone, America loses manned access to space. And it appears we can't even manage to cobble together a bloody capsule to put atop a normal rocket. This leaves only Russia with manned space capabilities. (I don't know if the Chinese really have anything they'd consider flight-worthy right now.) The Indians and Japanese have their own programs but I don't see much happening in the near future.

The Constellation program sounded like a real soup sandwich. Canceling it would be a good thing if it paved the way for something done right. But that's not happening. Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.

You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.

There's so much more we should be doing up there. The shuttle was just farting around in LEO. We should end it to do something better, not end it to abandon a manned presence in space. If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.

The main problem, I think (admittedly, among others), is that unless you're doing an all-out, money-is-no-object sort of thing like the 60s moon race, major projects take more time than changes in political leadership are willing to stand still for. So NASA ends up dithering back and forth every 3-6 years with a new project: manned mission to mars, shuttle replacement, low-cost capsule system, probe-focused unmanned space exploration, etc. I mean, Constellation was only proposed in 2005, with bids chosen by

>If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.

They'll go broke putting meatbags in space and learning the same lessons we have, while we're focused on robotic missions and investment into private enterprise, instead of a purely government approach.

On top of that, the Mars mission is still on. While China or India attempts to put a meatbag on the moon, the US will most likely be on its way to Mars. The US isnt ceding anything, its just spending its money more wisely along with the "trophy" of Mars. Turns out Bush's incompetence wasnt limited to just economies and wars, but to also signing checks his ass couldnt cash.

Funny how the "fiscally responsible" Republicans want my tax dollars to keep subsidizing useless jobs in Florida and Texas and keep a runaway project like Constellation going to the tune of an extra 3 billion a year in cost overruns! Dont confuse the politics of pork with space exploration. Meatbags are too expensive to ship around all the time and moon base fantasies turn out to be too expensive in real life.

Science is made by meatbags. Scientists are meatbags that don't hope to earn much money or fame (save for the very few that get a Nobel prize). No, our motivation is the science and the great things it can do for humankind. Specifically, my research is related to technology that can potentially be used on spacecraft/deep space probes. But if I knew it will only be used so that a rich banker can go to LEO, fuck it, I can go back to a job in industry and make about twice the money I make now. I can easily imagine that manned exploration of the Moon and Mars would similarly invigorate and inspire tens of thousands of US scientists, not to mention the other people involved, and the american public in general. The american nation could again have a big, common dream that transcends their short existence.

The Moon is very important because we can learn how to survive there, and then use that experience ans science to build a base on Mars. Yes, the Moon is in many ways harsher than Mars, but as far as things we can learn, it is still very useful, and the proximity of Earth is very useful in case of unexpected problems. Besides, if Constellation is out, Mars is out, too. It's *not* on.

Finally, I'd like to emphasize the need for manned exploration of Mars and other remote objects, as radio-delay makes robotic probes severely crippled to the point of being useless, compared to humans. A human can find ways to dislodge a stuck wheel, for one thing.

I'm all for the commercialization of Space. NASA was/is a waste of time and money.

You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we c

Has anyone ever actually tested what happens when you detonate a nuclear bomb in the upper ionosphere? My understanding is that it could charge it to the point of disruption of propagation of radio signals for days, which would have a severe economic effect. Supposedly it can be drained to ground via HAARP... or so says the guy who wrote the patent upon which it is based.

More importantly, it is not even necessary to lift so much mass from Earth. The technology almost exists today to mine asteroids using rob

The new plan seems to be to strengthen America's commercial launch vehicle systems. As things stand, America sucks at expendable launch vehicles. The Europeans and the Russians have bigger and more reliable ELVs than we do. If you construe this as a way to get NASA to off-load the design of rockets to private industry and to concentrate on space exploration, this is a good though very ballsy move. Private industry can lobby effectively while NASA cannot. If NASA had to design a rocket, it would have to plea

You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.

The problem is that, at least right now, the profit just isn't there.

If you could point at some asteroid and say it'll cost us $10 billion to get there and set up shop... And then you could ship home $100 billion worth of profit every month they'd be launching rockets in a heartbeat.

The cost of getting something out there just to analyze the asteroids and find a useful one... Then to set up shop... Then to haul the materials back here... And the time delays involved at every step... Even if it was all

Do you honestly think that if the Chinese get a toe-hold on the moon after spending tons of money that they're going to share it with everybody else magnanimously in a spirit of ideal altruism? Have you ever read a history book?

If I lived in a SyFy-Channel Movie-of-the-week, I would LOVE it if the Chinese established a permanent base on the moon, and claimed all of the moon for China. The moon is a long-term losing proposition anyway... very expensive to keep habitats habitable.

This would get everyone else in a frenzy to go claim Mars. Probably a multi-national group, including the USA, Russia, Europe, and Japan all ready to go grab a chunk of Mars for their respective countries, before China did likewise. And it would all happen

If I made more money, I'd probably have a set of new golf clubs on my wish list for this spring. As it is, I don't have an unlimited budget, and there are other priorities which are higher, such as food, healthcare, and DirecTV. I mention that last one intentionally, by the way.

You see I could do without DirecTV and save myself enough to get a new set of golf clubs every year. Thing is my wife an daughter really like the programming. They don't begrudge me my greens fees or my high power rocket purchases. Each of us gets something from the family budget, though perhaps not all we want. We simply don't have the unlimited funds for that.

It's interesting what happens when you must have a balanced budget - certain choices have to be made.

Absolutely. I usually try to save some of my spending money for a couple of golf lessons. I don't see Butch Harmon every week.

NASA isn't being closed, it's being scaled back in light of the budget. Now, if you were to believe Ronald Reagan, all you have to do it let a few contracts go dark to save the money - they're contractors. Keep the real expertise in house and work on the projects you do have. That won't happen, of course - the expertise has mostly migrated to contractors, with managers keeping the se

it's all speculation until someone reads the budget and the new policy is announced. Now that that's out of the way...

Heavy Lift: There's an understanding that we need heavy lift. It looks like a 200mT launcher is out of the question for now; but, we have plenty of experience, thanks to the ISS, in assembline large structures in space. So, the question becomes what form does an HLV take: A Shuttle Derived (Jupiter) derivative or an amped up Atlas / Delta derivative? Either could ultimately reach the 100-150mT range. The Shuttle Derived gets there faster using existing tooling.

Composite launch vehicle: Let's assume, for argument sake, that ULA is one of the suppliers of the "taxi" service. Lockheed, who is one of the two ULA parent companies, and who supplies the Atlas 5 launch vehicle, is building the Orion CEV for NASA. If ULA does supply the launch vehicle, what crew vehicle do you suppose they'll use? Perhaps the one they already have the tooling for? The one that's already a NASA approved design? I think so.

Inflatable structures: That technology was sold by NASA to Bigelow Aerospace, who then developed it further and did some limited testing in space LEO. NASA was going to incorporate Bigelow's work into their habitats. If NASA drops it, for now, Bigelow appears to have plans to continue the work. They've booked a Falcon 9 flight for 2014.

Lunar descent engine: What made that engine interesting was the use of LNG/LOX as a fuel. It worked. Well. That's likely to find further use down the line; but, I can't speculate where.

Government development of space is holding back commercial development. The time for initial investment has ended now that we know the basics. This article is full of good examples of this. The robot mower highlighted here is already being provided by the marketplace. Private ventures are preparing more forward thinking launch vehicles than the big rocket talked about in the article. There is always going to be some role or collective action, but government is no longer needed as the primary driver.

Put the moon rover up on Craigslist for $20M, with a 1 month limit on pickup time before the buyer loses their money and NASA re-lists the rover. It will be a win-win: either they raise the needed money to keep all of their programs, or someone will develop a vehicle to get to the moon and back so NASA doesn't have to.

Don't really see what the problem is. The U.S. is not going to pay off the debt. It's like worrying about the fact that you don't have a parachute AFTER you have jumped out of the plane; it just ruins the enjoyment of the ride down.

The amount of money NASA is asking about is trivial compared to the whole Federal Budget. Heck, the the U.S. government prints (via the proxy Federal Reserve) and borrows to pay the interest on what they have already borrowed. Worrying about the debt/deficit at this point is tilt

The interest rates at which the US borrows money reflects the lender's belief that they'll be paid back. Meaning they're pretty darned certain they're going to get their money back or they wouldn't lend it. If some hair brained politician followed your recommendations, you'd see this nasty little thing called hyperinflation rear its ugly head and your life would become rather more unpleasant than it is now.

Sure about that? Maybe they are just confident we will just keep paying the payments on interest...forever.....

As for being paid back. The whole freaking planet uses fiat money. You can't hide the fact that things are being bought for intrinsically less value than the paper being used to purchase them. Sure, you can pass legal tender laws FORCING businesses to take Fed promisary notes but eventually the shell game of passing the true cost around has to end.

Unlike fresh bread, there is a high degree of probability that the 10 gold coins will maintain their intrinsic value between today and tomorrow. However, if I choose to retain them in my possession, there is some cost I must incur to stor

The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.

Yes, we do, so that we can control oil resources and help companies like Halliburton be very profitable. We've decided as a society that we don't care about future energy sources, and we're going to stick with oil no matter what, so we have to use a giant portion of our GDP to fund a military for the sole purpose of maintaining access to that oil. Later on, when other societies develop energy sources not involving oil (such as electric cars, better nuclear power, solar power, tidal power, etc.), we'll still be driving around in old gas-guzzling vehicles looking for food with a collapsed economy while nations like China, India, and Russia are leading the world in technology and space exploration, and have prosperous economies.

Through all the brouhaha, the doubletalk about missing blueprints and the expense of reviving older tech, it would have been far inexpensive to bring back a tried and trusted heavy lifter: The Saturn V. The Block 90 series was all set to loft the heaviest payloads to date, even the Ariane V would be hard pressed to match it.I would have loved to see the V fly with upgraded hardware and avionics. The instrument ring would have been deleted in place for a more compact INS module. The inner structure rebuilt with improved metals and engineering. The engines... Well, hell, how can you improve on a already perfect set of man-made earthquake makers? I can see a V lofting not one, but TWO full sized ISS modules with them stuffed to the gills with parts and supplies.

NASA has *always* started up more programs than it could ever finish, so there'd be a good chance of what would eventually be needed already coming down the pipe. Add to the NASA developments all those designs put together by aero-corps most of which didn't get used. It ends up looking like a set up when something tests out well and then gets canceled. Being successful and being able to fit future requirements are not the same thing, and until a good test, they can't tell what the operating parmeters are for the vehicle. Also in this category are most of the best designs, those done around the edges of the aerospace industries. An example of these is the entire line of a multi-project program's worth of vehicles designed by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/astros/truax.htm [astronautix.com] and http://neverworld.net/truax/ [neverworld.net]

But the biggest culprit is of course programs developed to fulfill the goals of one administration, which get cut by the next or subsequent administrations. If NASA developed programs based on 'stair-step' continual expansion (making each step a requirement for the next) rather than political grandstanding, progress might be slower in gross effect but with far less net cost and effort.

As to 'why cancel the Ares and then start investigating a new heavy-lifter', first, Ares is not a new anything -- it's a hack built from shuttle components, meaning most of the technology is quite old (not to say that's bad, but it could be better). Second, the same could be said every few years for the last half century. Third, NASA and all the companies it feeds through its technology transfer program require constant renewal of R&D program direction in order to invent a whole new pile of golly-gee-whiz tech, and this is what NASA does best.

Take a look at the line of canceled and never-started projects derived from, and intended to expand, the Apollo lunar program. This is the best example of cancels soon after if not before development began. Follow the links below from the index page at http://www.astronautix.com/ [astronautix.com]

And a complete program already well into development, with success fairly assured. Had this not been canceled, Armstrong might still have been first one the moon, but definitely would have been the first to fly (not just ride) an orbital space plane. An extremely well documented example of cancelmania:X-20/23/24 Dynasoar

One project NASA may presently be regretting not following up on was an improved suspension and steering design for the Mars rovers. I'm not fully up on the details, but it would almost certainly have allowed Spirit to dig itself out of the sand. Apparently the story of its development and rejection was covered by some science-based talk show around 10 years ago. Some of the reasons they didn't pick up on it at the time made sense; the design they used was so far along that changing it would have cost much more, and being developed by an individual rather than the design team, training to bring them up to speed just to evaluate it would have taken too long. However, since the alternative design was produced by a college sophomore and was clearly better than that which was produced by an entire team, the fact that they resented being shown up by a kid is a distinct possibility. That's supported by the fact that his performance report was glowing, yet when he went to check out his supervisor told him "Don't bother to ask for a letter of reommendation". Turned out he didn't need one for his next summer job, at the National Ignition Facility. We're waiting to see whether they're using his design on Curiosity.

The inflatable structures are able to handle projectiles better than the stiff walled structures since they have some give to them and can disperse the energy across a larger area. The fact that they pack well is just bonus.

I'll point out that Browncoat is merely expressing an inability to understand why our current president's priorities differ so greatly from his own.

To be sure, I also find the current administration's stance on this subject incomprehensible. It reminds me of the first shuttle disaster (Challenger). I was in Berkeley and a (hyper-)liberal associate of mine was thrilled at the Challenger disaster. He thought this was just the thing to get the US to stop spending money in space and instead spend it on our

Postmodernists are only one strand of liberals, just as theocrats are only one strand of conservatives. You'd be mistaken to say that they're either leading the coalition or defining it, and you are mistaken in your later paragraphs when you suggest that they are "the liberals" or that all environmentalists are the "we should live naked in the woods" sort.

I'm not a democrat, but I'm a liberal (one committed to environmental causes), and I'd love to see more funds go to interesting NASA projects (and DARPA p

"When I told my 10-year-old daughter that Obama had killed the program that was her best chance to travel to the Moon or Mars, she literally started crying. How am I supposed to keep her interested in math and science in school when the only thing she's ever wanted to do has been taken away from her?"

Wait, so it's Obama's fault that you're a bad parent? First, there is still a NASA and a space program. Second, help the kid find some other interests. We live in a world of almost an infinite number of things

you make 2 assumptions which I believe are false:1) the technology developed by constellation would have been applicable for the average person. It wouldn't; no more anyway than Saturn V was. Constellation was a dead end.2) It would take decades to develop technology of equivalent technology. Nope the problems of getting into space are mainly materials science and economic. If she wants to get into space, then campaign to get Supersonic/Hypersonic Transport back on the table. Unless of course you're willing